failure.
The Holy City had become for them a fortress full of fiends, when Godfrey
de Bouillon again set himself sword in hand upon the wooden tower and gave
the order once more to drag it tottering towards the towers on either
side of the postern gate. So they crawled again across the fosse
full of the slain, dragging their huge house of timber behind them,
and all the blast and din of war broke again about their heads.
A hail of bolts hammered such shields as covered them for a canopy,
stones and rocks fell on them and crushed them like flies in
the mire, and from the engines of the Greek Fire all the torrents
of their torment came down on them like red rivers of hell.
For indeed the souls of those peasants must have been sickened
with something of the topsy-turvydom felt by too many peasants of our
own time under the frightful flying batteries of scientific war;
a blasphemy of inverted battle in which hell itself has occupied heaven.
Something of the vapours vomited by such cruel chemistry may
have mingled with the dust of battle, and darkened such light
as showed where shattering rocks were rending a roof of shields,
to men bowed and blinded as they are by such labour of dragging
and such a hailstorm of death. They may have heard through
all the racket of nameless noises the high minaret cries
of Moslem triumph rising shriller like a wind in shrill pipes,
and known little else of what was happening above or beyond them.
It was most likely that they laboured and strove in that lower darkness,
not knowing that high over their heads, and up above the cloud
of battle, the tower of timber and the tower of stone had touched
and met in mid-heaven; and great Godfrey, alone and alive,
had leapt upon the wall of Jerusalem.

CHAPTER XII

THE FALL OF CHIVALRY

On the back of this book is the name of the New Jerusalem and on
the first page of it a phrase about the necessity of going back
to the old even to find the new, as a man retraces his steps
to a sign-post. The common sense of that process is indeed most
mysteriously misunderstood. Any suggestion that progress has at
any time taken the wrong turning is always answered by the argument
that men idealise the past, and make a myth of the Age of Gold.
If my progressive guide has led me into a morass or a man-trap
by turning to the left by the red pillar-box, instead of to
the right by the blue palings of the inn called the Rising Sun,
my progressive guide always pr